The strong growth in demand for portable consumer electronics is driving the need for high-capacity storage devices. Non-volatile semiconductor memory devices, such as flash memory storage cards, are widely used to meet the ever-growing demands on digital information storage and exchange. Their portability, versatility and rugged design, along with their high reliability and large capacity, have made such memory devices ideal for use in a wide variety of electronic devices, including for example digital cameras, digital music players, video game consoles, PDAs and cellular telephones.
Semiconductor memory may be provided within a semiconductor package, which protects the semiconductor memory and enables communication between the memory and a host device. Examples of semiconductor packages include system-in-a-package (SiP) or multichip modules (MCM), where a plurality of die are mounted and interconnected on a small footprint substrate.
Semiconductor die are typically batch processed together in a semiconductor wafer. Once the integrated circuits have been defined on the individual die, the die are diced from the wafer and removed for mounting within a package. Stealth dicing before grinding (occasionally referred to herein as “SDBG”) is an emerging dicing technology, where laser pulses are focused between the top and bottom surfaces of the wafer in rows and columns defining the outlines of the individual semiconductor die. Subsequent mechanical perturbations, such as occur during the wafer background process, cause the wafer to fracture cleanly along the rows and columns defining the semiconductor die outlines.
While SDBG offers certain process efficiencies, SDBG has one disadvantage in that it may lead to cracking of the individual semiconductor die at the corners. In particular, during the mechanical backgrind process, where the grinding wheel passes over individual semiconductor die which have already been separated, the die can crash into each other, at times causing chipping or cracking at the corners. While the die are mounted on a tape during the backgrind process, the tape allows a small measure of movement between the die, and this small movement may be enough to result in the chipping and cracking described above.